From Confrontation to Collaboration: Peasant Negotiations in the Arena of Decentralization

Decentralization and local democracy are two inseparable elements of post-New Order Indonesia development politics. Furthermore, the quality of decentralization to a certain extent is influenced by the depth and quality of local democratic practices. This study reveals that decentralization is not only an arena of competition between local elites in possession of capital through local democratic institutions, but also an arena in which grassroots groups (peasants) could fight for their land rights. This study observes that local democratic procedures and institutions that are practiced in unison with decentralization are not utilized by the lower classes in the struggle for their rights. This shows the failure of local democratic institutions from taking root in the marginal groups. The success of peasant movements in the struggle for their rights and the practice of local elite domination of the decentralization arena does not come out of the blue, but is related to the history of the formation of the agrarian structure and social class. This study concludes that on one side, local elites trust democratic institutions and procedures to achieve their goals, while on the other side the grassroots have their own logic on how local democracy should have been practiced, namely by not separating practice of local democracy from the missions of justice and social welfare for the common good.

Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies

This article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram) in India’s National Capital Region. I link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. In particular, I examine corruption as both a political-economic and a physical, caste-based narrative to argue that corruption connects embodiment and urban development ecologies to each other. This allows corruption discourses in Gurgaon to form a critique of real estate economies; changing urban environments are felt and critiqued through body politics and experienced at once as a peril and a pleasure. This work is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in NCR involving members across the production chain of real estate, including landowners, investment bankers, developers, engineers, architects, foremen, and laborers.

The Politics of Fertility: The Global Emergence of 'Pro-Family' Organisations

<p>This thesis is part of a small but growing literature on the activism of Christian Right 'pro-family' organisations from the United States (US) in international development politics. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the texts of five globally active 'pro-family'organisations from 1997 until the end of 2008. One of the major findings is that the 'pro-family' political project, previously defined as the defence of the family against powerful global elites, is now being articulated against values associated with industrialisation and modernity. Through this change, longheld Christian Right tenets such as hostility to feminism, staunch adherence to free markets, and suspicion of the UN, are being reconsidered or redefined to suit the needs of the 'pro-family' movement. By mapping the ways that 'pro-family' discourse is changing, this thesis shows the impacts that globalization and involvement at the UN is having on this set of conservative Christians, and how their agenda is changing as a result of their political activism outside of the US. This thesis provides a current, comprehensive and reliable review of the activist publications of the US 'pro-family' movement, and as such, offers an insight into the changing agenda of a movement that is growing both in organisational aptitude and in global influence.</p>

The Politics of Fertility: The Global Emergence of 'Pro-Family' Organisations

<p>This thesis is part of a small but growing literature on the activism of Christian Right 'pro-family' organisations from the United States (US) in international development politics. This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the texts of five globally active 'pro-family'organisations from 1997 until the end of 2008. One of the major findings is that the 'pro-family' political project, previously defined as the defence of the family against powerful global elites, is now being articulated against values associated with industrialisation and modernity. Through this change, longheld Christian Right tenets such as hostility to feminism, staunch adherence to free markets, and suspicion of the UN, are being reconsidered or redefined to suit the needs of the 'pro-family' movement. By mapping the ways that 'pro-family' discourse is changing, this thesis shows the impacts that globalization and involvement at the UN is having on this set of conservative Christians, and how their agenda is changing as a result of their political activism outside of the US. This thesis provides a current, comprehensive and reliable review of the activist publications of the US 'pro-family' movement, and as such, offers an insight into the changing agenda of a movement that is growing both in organisational aptitude and in global influence.</p>

Book Reviews

MIGRANT HOUSING: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration. Mirjana Lozanovska. 2019. Abingdon: Routledge. 242 pages. ISBN 9781138574090 (Hardback).THE AGE OF MIGRATION: International Population Movements in the Modern World. 6th ed. Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles, Mark J. Mille. 2020. London: Red Globe Press. 446 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1352007985.REFUGEE IMAGINARIES: Research across the Humanities. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, eds. 2020. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 642 pages. ISBN 9781474443197 (hardback).MIGRATION AS A (GEO-)POLITICAL CHALLENGE IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE: Border Regimes, Policy Choices, Visa Agendas. Olga R. Gulina. 2019. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag. 120 pages. ISBN: 9783838213385.COMPARATIVE REVIEW: Migration and Development in India: Provincial and Historical PerspectivesINDIA MOVING: A History of Migration. Chinmay Tumbe. 2018. New York: Penguin Viking. 285 pages. ISBN: 9780670089833.PROVINCIAL GLOBALISATION IN INDIA: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics. Carol Upadhya, Mario Rutten, and Leah Koskimaki, eds. 2020. New York: Routledge. 193 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-06962-6.

Megaprojects—mega failures? The politics of aspiration and the transformation of rural Kenya

Megaprojects are returning to play a key role in the transformation of rural Africa, despite controversies over their outcome. While some view them as promising tools for a ‘big push’ of modernization, others criticize their multiple adverse effects and risk of failure. Against this backdrop, the paper revisits earlier concepts that have explained megaproject failures by referring to problems of managerial complexity and the logics of state-led development. Taking recent examples from Kenya, the paper argues for a more differentiated approach, considering the symbolic role infrastructure megaprojects play in future-oriented development politics as objects of imagination, vision, and hope. We propose to explain the outcomes of megaprojects by focusing on the ‘politics of aspiration’, which unfold at the intersection between different actors and scales. The paper gives an overview of large infrastructure projects in Kenya and places them in the context of the country´s national development agenda ‘Vision 2030′. It identifies the relevant actors and investigates how controversial aspirations, interests and foreign influences play out on the ground. The paper concludes by describing megaproject development as future making, driven by the mobilizing power of the ‘politics of aspiration’. The analysis of megaprojects should consider not only material outcomes but also their symbolic dimension for desirable futures.

New Herding Networks

This chapter examines the multiple meanings that the case studies presented in this book hold for development politics, programs, and research. This analysis does not point to a winner or singular conclusion. Instead, it indicates that many herding communities are producing data, narratives, images, and films that enrich and advance academic and international understanding of moments of crisis. This chapter examines how herding communities deliberate through frames of “nomadology,” proleptic elegies, and settlement. It concludes with an examination of the roles of academics in ensuring that nomadic and mobile communities are accurately represented, discussed, consulted, and collaborated with in future research projects.

Arjun Appadurai

Arjun Appadurai (b. 1949), currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the methods and theories of anthropology, history, political economy, and cultural studies. His scholarship, while originally rooted in area studies of South Asia, encompasses programmatic work aimed at formulating conceptual rubrics and questions to guide comparative and critical cultural studies of globalization, development, politics, and economy. He writes for audiences of scholars, creative practitioners, and activists, and for a broader public. A central intervention has been his framing of globalization in ways that privilege the work of imagination and futurity in its constituent processes and institutions; to this end, he has emphasized the mobility of ideas, images, finance, and persons and the durable domains of translocal interaction (e.g., ethnoscapes, finanscapes) that such mobility produces, while downplaying the territorial and cultural fixity of nation-states and localities. A signature rubric, “public culture,” advanced in his own work and especially in the journal of that name, co-founded and co-edited with his late wife, Carol Breckenridge, captures the malleable, contested, and multiply mediated notion of culture that underlies this understanding of globalization. This conception of culture is also meant to signal how hope and aspiration may be articulated with everyday worlds of meaning and action. Over the past four decades, his published work has encompassed books and edited collections, journal articles, chapters, and commentaries. Much of that work has derived from collaborative projects involving both original research and editorial activities, several associated with the journal, Public Culture, and with the Cultures of Finance Working Group, based at New York University. Appadurai also co-founded, with Carol Breckenridge, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research), a Mumbai-based research collective that works with urban Indian communities who are grappling with local impacts of urbanization and globalization. Appadurai’s ideas about culture, globalization, development, commodification, identity politics, and postcolonialism have influenced scholarship in many fields, from his own core disciplines to media and communications studies, postcolonial studies, architecture, urban studies, and political theory.